Given its scale and significance, I will present my analysis of this project in several installments. These are the ten design proposals shortlisted for the next series of euro banknotes. At this moment, they are under the gaze of millions. Citizens of the euro area have been invited to choose their favorites in a survey that will remain open until September 21...

Designing the banknotes destined to circulate throughout a monetary area such as Europe is among the most prestigious and consequential commissions a professional or design studio can receive. Creating an image to be shared by millions of people, condensing an identity into visual form, and meeting complex demands of legibility, security, symbolism, and instant recognition constitute a task at which even a demigod like Hercules might have failed...

Yesterday, a video circulated widely across social media showing the arrest of a young transgender person on February 5, 2025, at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. The footage shows a "highly agitated" Jarrett Vick, a 27-year-old transgender student, confronting several officers who were on campus for unrelated reasons...

Maximilian of Habsburg, the emperor whom the French Intervention installed on the throne, built the Paseo de la Emperatriz —modeled on the Parisian boulevards— to link Chapultepec Castle with the city center. Mexico's conservative quarters looked kindly upon it. When the empire fell, the republican governments renamed it Paseo de la Reforma. This Reforma is the Mexican liberal one, the laws driven by Benito Juárez that separated Church from State and consolidated the Republic.

Influencers and aspiring ones live attentive to whatever happens, eager to reheat it and serve it back to the feeds as if they had just discovered the principle of buoyancy. But few like the man from Syracuse, and very little capable of provoking a genuine eureka.

A couple of days ago I was sent a Hypermedia article signed by Jorge Camacho in which he “interprets some little-known phrases by the Cuban writer —referring to José Martí!— with the aim of drawing attention to that dark, invisibilized side of his personality that neither Cuban institutions nor Cuban artists have shown any interest in exploring.”

I have a couple of friends named Ramses. I met them in Cuba, and both ended up in Spain. I’m not sure if they are still there, probably. But what continues to strike me is not the trajectory. How is it that I have two friends with the name of a pharaoh? How is this possible?
I tend to think it has to do with Ramses II—the pharaoh who ruled Pi-Ramesses (Nile Delta) between 1279 and 1213 BC. Western civilization had little awareness of his existence until the early seventeenth century.

I finally watched Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man. What stayed with me was not the film. It was the fact that people hate Barry Keoghan’s face, and that Barry Keoghan has begun to listen. He has even said that comments about his appearance on social media make him feel insecure and unsettled. I admit I am somewhat surprised by his fragility—or his “high sensitivity to sensory processing.” He is hardly a nobody. He enjoys fame, and everything money can buy. What it cannot buy belongs to the cost.

It takes only a glance at my MSN (Microsoft Start) homepage to think that every day someone discovers something that forces us to rewrite the history of humanity. I imagine historians exasperated, stalled again and again on the first page.
One of those stories—always amusing—claims that 'a set of geometric markings engraved between 34,000 and 45,000 years ago on small sculptures and tools is forcing a revision of the history of human communication.'